Anne McGuire: I am pleased that my hon. Friend has raised that constituency matter and I reassure him that, if he will provide me with further details, I will certainly investigate what happened. It is unacceptable that families under pressure, in the circumstances that my hon. Friend has highlighted, should find that our system is not responsive. If he gives me the details, I will ensure that he receives a suitable and appropriate reply. I continue to underline the fact that our disability living allowance systems are in place and effective. They turn round benefit claims very quickly—not just mainstream claims within a 35-day target. In the case of people with terminal conditions, claims are turned round within 4 to 5 days.

Kate Hoey: I welcome the progress made at St. Andrews based on the fundamental principle of all parties accepting the rule of law. I also welcome the ancillary agreements to do with academic selection and rates. On rate capping, exactly what would happen if for some, perhaps technical, reason the Ard Fheis was not able to be held by 24 November, the date passed, and there was no First Minister or Deputy Minister? Is the Secretary of State really saying that the pensioners of Northern Ireland, who would be helped by his proposed change, would no longer be helped and the rating system would stay as it is?

Edward Davey: I am grateful for the hon. Lady's intervention. I shall provide detailed analysis of our policy and advocate it to the House tonight. We do envisage a partial privatisation of the Post Office, with 49 per cent. of the shares being sold to the private sector. Her Government, however, are privatising Royal Mail by stealth. They are under-investing in Royal Mail and are not backing it, and as a result private competitors are winning market share and undermining the Royal Mail, its employees' jobs and services to our constituents. She is therefore backing privatisation by stealth, and she ought to be aware of that.

David Drew: As someone who was a member of the Committee that considered the Postal Services Act 2000, may I ask whether the Minister accepts that one our arguments during those proceedings was about the relative unfairness of the Royal Mail alone having to meet the cost of the universal service obligation? Other companies that come into the marketplace should also be required to meet the obligation, especially if they intend to offer a national service. Are the Government examining that matter?

Jim Fitzpatrick: My hon. Friend makes a good point and speaks with his experience of that Committee. As he is probably aware, a live debate about that matter is going on in the industry.
	Royal Mail has developed a business strategy that will transform the business over the next five years. It involves the introduction and deployment of new sorting equipment and more efficient ways of working, and the rationalisation of the mail pipeline. That will need investment, and the Government are prepared to put in place the finance required to achieve that transformation. The Secretary of State set out the proposed finance framework that was agreed in principle with Royal Mail in his written statement to the House on 18 May. The measures in the framework allow the company to stabilise the pension deficit and give it the funds that it needs to transform the business.
	The detail of the finance framework has not yet been finalised. The documentation is being drawn up, but, most importantly, the company and the Government need to agree on how the work force should be incentivised to deliver the transformation. The Royal Mail board has made it clear that it strongly believes that an employee share scheme is the best way to do that, and has submitted a proposal. The Government are prepared to consider options for incentivising employees in Royal Mail, including an employee share scheme in the context of a publicly owned business, under which shares would be held in a trust for the benefit of employees, and could not be transferred to non-employees.
	The motion states that the delay in finalising the finance framework is damaging Royal Mail. In reply, I would say to Liberal Democrat Members that although the finance framework is not yet in place, the company has been preparing for the implementation of its strategy and has made other operational changes to improve its efficiency. It has not been in a state of paralysis. The Government are actively considering Royal Mail's proposals, but will not be pushed into making decisions without a thorough examination of the proposals that have been put to us. I understand that that is called due diligence in the business world. It would not be right for the Government, who are entrusted with looking after the taxpayers' shareholding in Royal Mail, not to carry out proper due diligence before making an informed decision.
	The Government strongly believe that Royal Mail can compete in a fully liberalised market and meet its obligations to provide a universal postal service. A successful Royal Mail is good for the shareholder, the management, the employees, the taxpayer and the UK as a whole.
	In both the post office network and Royal Mail, the endeavours of both the Government and the businesses will ultimately depend for their success, as ever, on the skills, dedication and sheer hard work of sub-postmasters and employees, which we often tend to take for granted, but which should never be underestimated or overlooked. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State has made clear, we are determined to give the post office the certainty that it needs by putting the network on a long-term stable footing. We are equally determined to continue to help Royal Mail on its way forward. I commend the amendment to the House.

Robert Smith: I congratulate the hon. Member for Vauxhall (Kate Hoey), who chairs the all-party group on sub-post offices, on making a strong case for an urgent decision by the Government on the social role that they envisage for post offices in urban and rural areas. Post offices still have a vital role to play, and if we lose that network, we will not be able to recreate it.
	The hon. Lady also strongly reinforced the point about the Post Office card account and the need to ensure that there is a basic card account that satisfies the wishes of those who only want such an account. We do not need a one-size-fits-all arrangement in which the Government decrees, "Thou shalt have a bank account, with all the bells and whistles", because that would involve accepting all the risks if things went wrong. Some people liked their old giro cheques and did not really want to change to the card account. However, they accepted that account because it at least offered the guarantee that it could not be overdrawn and did not carry the risk of bank charges or any other extra costs.
	The hon. Lady mentioned that it might be difficult for the Minister to come up with any concrete answers at this stage, but the Government said that they would have some concrete answers by the autumn. I know that the Minister has been advised that the autumn will carry on until 12 December—or even 21 December—but it would be helpful to get the answers earlier than that. Many people do not realise that most sub-post offices are small businesses run by private individuals making investment decisions, and that they need to know the framework in which they are operating. They therefore need to know the Government's mind on these matters, when so much now depends on Government decisions. Postcomm has also challenged the Government to recognise that.
	Last week, it was a matter of concern to hon. Members when the Leader of the House stated at business questions that the collapse of the postal market was a problem for the Post Office. Actually, the postal market is doing quite well at the moment. He talked about the internet and e-mail, but internet trading is resulting in the postage of a lot more packages and parcels. One of the social inclusion issues that is possibly not being properly addressed is the future role of the Post Office in receiving parcels and handling the postage of items for special delivery. The universal service obligation appears to require only about 4,000 post offices. A great deal of the debate about the future of the rural post office network has been about access to benefits and to the means to pay bills. However, if those other services are not there to support the post office, and the post office closes, the access to the postal network, to commercial transactions and to cash for small businesses will also go. The wider benefits of maintaining the network are therefore extremely important.
	The most disappointing aspect of the way in which the BBC made its recent decision is that it did not take all its licence payers into consideration. It has said that PayPoint is a replacement for the post office for those who still want to pay for their television licence in person. However, it has not taken into consideration how sparse the PayPoint network is in rural areas. Its decision has therefore greatly restricted access for licence payers in those areas. The BBC should have used its imagination to work with the Post Office to develop a rural product that would allow people to continue to access the same service in rural areas to which it believes its urban licence payers are entitled. The BBC needs to look again at that decision.

Christopher Huhne: I do not know what the hon. Gentleman was quoting from, but the document that we voted on at our conference and the accompanying figures made it clear that there would be a substantial increase. We would be looking at getting roughly four times as much revenue out of the aviation sector as is currently the case. He may be confusing that with the fact that there are particular flights where, because of load factors and fuel efficiency, one would not necessary expect anything like that increase—if any increase—in taxation. The burden of taxation will be different.
	The most thorough report commissioned by the Nordic Council from the Danish National Environmental Research Institute in Copenhagen pointed out that Sweden, most notably, is undertaking an overall tax shift, replacing income taxes with taxes on energy, transport and pollution that amount to several billion Swedish kronor. The report says:
	"The Nordic countries pioneered the introduction of carbon and energy taxes and recent studies have addressed their impacts on CO2 emissions. Despite different methodological approaches, the general result which emerges is that such taxes have made an important difference to emission levels. In Finland, CO2 emissions would have been 7 per cent. higher at the end of 1990s had the taxes not been introduced, while in Demark the tax-subsidy scheme on industrial CO2 emissions caused emissions to decline by 23 per cent. in just seven years, to a level 31 per cent. lower than would be the case under a business-as-usual scenario."
	Let me deal with possible adverse side effects. Inevitably, those of us of a progressive disposition worry about the impact of indirect taxes on income distribution. Of course, indirect taxes may prove to be regressive if, as is normally the case, expenditure on necessities represents a higher proportion of the income of the poor than that of the well-off. That is why Liberal Democrats have been careful not to propose the extension of the climate change levy, or a climate tax on households, before we have a far more successful scheme to improve energy efficiency.
	The taxes that we propose are not regressive, and one can see that in the case of the vehicle excise duty. Poorer households do not own cars. Some 28 per cent. of British households are without access to any car. Moreover, even among those who have a car, it is rare to find families that buy new cars. However, the VED rates would apply to new cars. On aviation, too, the average income of leisure travellers from UK airports, which was surveyed recently by the Civil Aviation Authority, was nearly £50,000 a year, or more than double the national average. Labour Members might be especially interested to know that nearly 80 per cent. of leisure flights are taken by people in the top half of the income distribution, with only 20 per cent. taken by those in the bottom half. There is also further evidence from the Nordic Council report:
	"Another main result is that while energy taxes tend to be distributionally regressive, taxes on transport, fuels and pollution are, respectively, progressive and neutral."
	It is clear, however, as has been suggested, that such a policy might adversely affect those in rural areas if special considerations were not made. That was why we proposed during proceedings on the Finance Bill that there should be a 50 per cent. discount on a household's first car in sparsely populated rural areas and why we believe that we should consider reducing excise duty rates on fuel to offset some of the disadvantages of remoteness for rural communities that rely on cars.
	Overall, the package would aim to raise the yield from green taxes back to the share of national income at the peak of 1999. It thus represents a rise of 0.7 per cent. of gross domestic product. It would be a sensible first step, after which we should assess its effects and other measures that might be necessary to achieve the goals. I reiterate that the key promise of the package is that the revenue raised from green taxes should go back in cuts in taxes on good things, such as effort, risk and work.
	I will now address precisely the point raised by the hon. Member for Bournemouth, East (Mr. Ellwood): will the revenue disappear? Certainly not any more than it does in the case of other sin taxes, such as those on alcohol and tobacco, or the congestion charge. There would be behavioural effects, which is what we would want, but we would not be trying to get rid of the behaviour altogether because the appropriate instrument to achieve that would be not a green tax, but a regulation to ban the activity entirely. I hope that Conservative Members will thus be sympathetic to a proposal that is a market-oriented measure designed to ensure that our carbon emissions are sustainable.

Elliot Morley: We have had an interesting debate on a serious issue. I welcome the fact that the Liberal Democrats chose the subject for an Opposition day debate, but disappointed about their preoccupation with gross domestic product, which provides a weak assessment of the performance of green taxes.
	Apart from the examples provided by the Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, the Government have introduced a range of measures that will not feature in the calculation at all—tradeable landfill allowances, for example, which have a tremendous effect in boosting recycling. In turn, that provides more efficient energy use, which reduces CO2 .
	My hon. Friend the Minister will correct me if I am wrong, but another big change that would not necessarily be calculated in green tax schemes is the Treasury's policy on company car taxation. Companies buy the most new cars—they account for the bulk of new car sales—and the changes that the Chancellor introduced to company car taxation have made a real difference to marketing and emissions in respect of manufacturers. I am inclined to agree that green taxes represent a low proportion of physical activity and there is a case for expanding a whole range of green fiscal measures. I know that the Treasury has not been afraid to look into them. There have been some shifts on that issue and the climate change levy provides one example.
	I listened carefully to what the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Gregory Barker) said, but as my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Test (Dr. Whitehead) said, we heard no indication of any kind of policy. I understand that a policy review is taking place, but that argument can be run only for so long. It is time-limited. The Conservatives cannot go on saying that the answer to everything is to have a policy review. It is already damaging the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), because people are beginning to get tired of the fact that the Conservatives have no policies, as everything is subject to a review.
	There may well be a case for having a carbon tax as opposed to a climate change levy. We should be open-minded about that and any proposals should be examined, but we have to see what the proposals are, how they are going to work, how they will be applied and whether they will prove more effective than the climate change levy. If the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle looked at independent analysis of the climate change levy, he would find that it has been very effective in reducing emissions.

Martin Horwood: As ever, I am grateful for my hon. Friend's intervention; he extremely learned in matters of price elasticity of demand, and I am sure that he will communicate them at length to the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle, should he wish to have more detail. The hon. Gentleman said that we were behaving frivolously and that we were in a hurry. I plead guilty to the latter—we are certainly in more of a hurry than the Conservatives are to elucidate our policies. He said that he supports the broad thrust of our motion, yet he opposed all the specifics. I am beginning to have some sympathy with the Government. In their debates on the NHS, the official Opposition proclaim support for the NHS —[Interruption.] The relevance of my point is shown by the Conservatives' reluctance to give us any policy detail on anything whatsoever. They have promised depth and delivered green fluff—presumably inspired by their new logo.
	The truth is that, for 30 years, the Liberals and then the Liberal Democrats have been the greenest party in Parliament. For many years, we were berated by members of the Conservative party and described as sandal-wearing bearded loonies for saying such things, but the truth is that we were simply —[Interruption.] I wear no sandals and I have no beard. The truth is that we were simply ahead of our time, and we remain so today.

Alan Simpson: No, I will not, because I want to let the winding-up speeches begin in eight minutes time. People have been round the houses and the 4x4s to the point of doing them to death. I am happy to expand on this issue on another occasion, but I should point out that in my view, we need to focus much more on changing behaviour than on the ability to raise taxation.
	Carbon emissions are also used as a proxy for climate change policies, but the reality is that, like most people in this country, most Members of this House would not know a tonne of carbon if we fell over it. It is extremely helpful that people have translated the concept into accessible terms. Roughly speaking, a hot air balloon 10 metres in diameter is the equivalent of 1 tonne of carbon. Let us transpose that into aviation terms. Aviation in the UK is currently responsible for 35 million tonnes of carbon per annum, so let us picture 35 million hot air balloons cluttering the skies. On the most conservative assumption, the figure of 35 million tonnes will rise to 60 million tonnes by 2030. Sixty million hot air balloons in the skies would obliterate daylight from large sections of the UK. That is the scale of the issue that we have to tackle.
	I doubt whether including aviation fuel in the emissions trading scheme makes a ha'p'orth of sense, and it is important that someone puts down a marker in this debate that such schemes are a complete scam. If one begins from the premise that in order to tackle pollution, one has to create a fictional good, against which one then unleashes speculation, only in doing so to deter long-term investment because it is impossible to predict the price of that good, one should not be surprised to end up in the mess that the European emissions trading scheme ended up in at the end of its first year of operation. People cheat. They make even more crass mistakes by giving away quotas to the most polluting, rather than to the least polluting.
	I would like to believe that things would be better if we gave quotas to individuals, but I know that that is not true. As my hon. Friend the Member for Scunthorpe (Mr. Morley) knows, it is not the fishermen who own fishing quotas now; it is the banks. The outcome is a trading circle between the wealthy that does not address issues of sustainability.
	I urge hon. Members to look at the work of one of the foremost authorities on this subject: William Nordhaus of Yale university. He urges us to move from quotas to taxes and tariffs. If we make that transition, we should not presume that the taxes come to us as a Government. Let us look at the German model, where the authorities have used, with incredible creativity, two pieces of legislation in combination: the 1991 electricity feed Act, which dealt with people's right to sell energy back into the system, and the 2000 renewable energy sources Act.
	The German authorities told their energy industry, "Right, we're going to set different tariffs—you sort out the different payments yourselves." They required the industry to pay people a much higher rate for energy that they supplied to the system than the industry charged for energy that it supplied to people. The rate paid in Germany for renewable energies is currently about 35p per KWh. I have just completed the construction of my own eco-house, which generates more energy than it consumes, but what do I discover but that in this country those who generate energy are paid next to nothing for it. Many companies pay nothing; others pay up to about 3.5p per KWh. Ten times as much is paid to those who supply energy in Germany as is paid in the UK. Furthermore, the authorities in Germany have told the industry to pay for all this—there is no Government subsidy. Everything must be internally financed by the industry. As a result, Germany is pulling away from the rest of us in terms of investment and trade in renewable energies, as well as in terms of the skills and training that deliver a different type of sustainable economy. We lag behind because, instead, we are obsessed with the idea of a market in mythical goods.
	We should apply the notion of duties to a series of measures that are within our own remit. Of course, we could do that by regulation, but we seem to have turned our back on the process of regulation. We could have created a requirement that all new housing should meet the minimum standard of a SAP—standard assessment of performance—65 energy efficient rating. That requirement is already in place in large parts of Europe. Did we do it? No—we turned our back on that in the Housing Act 2004, which we passed in the last Parliament. We could have said to owners of houses in multiple occupation—the most inefficient properties in the UK's property portfolio—that, as a condition of their obtaining an HMO licence, those properties, too, would have to meet the minimum standard of SAP 65. We could have given a stamp duty rebate on properties that had been turned into energy generating properties, but we declined to do that in the Budget.
	We could have introduced building and planning regulations to empower local authorities to require that all new buildings generate a proportion of their own energy and recycle water resources. I visited a school just outside Nottingham that recycles 50 per cent. of the water that falls on its roof and has thereby halved its water bill. I was impressed, but I was told that doing that was an obligation in some German states. The Germans understood that they had problems of flash flooding that needed to be tackled, so they told local authorities that such recycling had to be a duty. We retreat from such action. In the name of light-touch regulation, we abrogate our responsibilities to the future and to the planet.
	If we are serious about transforming our economy into one in which we can live sustainably, within a single footprint of our ecological entitlements, we have to have the courage to transform markets radically. We must not be anti-market; we must become pro-ethical markets and pro-sustainable markets. In the process of doing that, we will discover that there will be markets that we own collectively. That would be a wonderful legacy for this Prime Minister; to be remembered for restoring clause IV and the principles of common ownership in the interests of a sustainable planet.